Le Jardin de la Licorne

Cycle du Domaine de R. #2

by Jacques Sadoul

180pages. poche. Poche.

183 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Winner of the ESFS Awards in 1980 as "Best Author".

Né à Agen, il a publié de nombreux romans, des essais sur l'alchimie, l'astrologie, l'histoire de la science-fiction et de la BD. Il a obtenu le Grand Prix de la littérature policière pour "Trois morts au soleil".

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book #2 in the series that concludes with Les Hautes-Terres Du Rêve , and, as far as the content goes, I don't have much to add to that review.

Probably the most interesting thing about it is the reason why I no longer have my copy. I was a grad student in Uppsala in 1984, and I was writing my first natural language processing system together with a female grad student whom I'll call A. If you're curious to know what her real name is, Google Scholar will probably let you figure it out within 10 minutes, but anyway.

Now A was an attractive young woman, and the head of department (I'll call him S) was a randy old goat, and pretty soon S decided that he was also very interested in natural language processing. There was a slight problem, namely that he didn't know a damn thing about it, but hey, he was a moderately famous academic. Why would he need to? He'd be able to make something up and we wouldn't be able to tell the difference. So, at least this is the way I reconstructed it, S spent an evening looking through some book on linguistic philosophy, and he found that there was a lot of discussion about the correct way to represent the sentence "John seeks a unicorn" in formal logic.

If you think this is interesting and you actually want to understand the problem, I warmly recommend Introduction to Montague Semantics by Dowty, Wall and Peters. But S evidently didn't feel that he needed to spend more than one evening reading about what other people had written, because he'd already figured it out. He told A and me that the correct answer was

(E x).unicorn(x) & (E y).seeks(john, y)

i.e. "there exists an x such that x is a unicorn and there exists a y such that John seeks y". Writing this down, I think I may be misremembering some detail. But there was definitely at least one existential quantifier in there, it was definitely a first-order sentence, and it was definitely crazy - the reason why the example is interesting is that you can't do it in first order predicate logic, so he was completely missing the point. It's possible that it was crazy in some slightly different way. I was embarrassed for S, whom I'd previously thought of as being a smart guy.

So S started turning up in A's room several times a day, ostensibly with the purpose of discussing language and logic. At least a couple of times, I recall arriving just as he left. I'd ask her what they'd been talking about, and she'd say "Unicorns" in a rather tired way.

This went on for a while, and one day I remembered that I had Le Jardin De La Licorne lying around at home. I brought it with me to work next morning, and left it on A's desk. I was curious to see what would happen.

Well, I still don't know. All I can say is, A didn't look very happy when I left it there, and S didn't look that thrilled either, and a few days later the book had unaccountably disappeared. Your guess is as good as mine.

There's plenty more to this story, but none of the rest of it has to do with unicorns or Jacques Sadoul.

[Pauline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cela commence par un alchimiste dans son laboratoire puis une jeune femme est embauchée pour être gardé malade dans un château angoissant. Ce roman nous plonge dans le monde des rêves où Golem et étrangetés se côtoient.
J’ai longtemps hésité entre 3 et 4 étoiles car je n’ai pas réussi à lâcher ce livre. Mais franchement, était ce vraiment utiles à l’histoire toutes ces scènes de rapports et de viols ? (Réponse évidente : non)

[Xabi1990 · Rating 2 out of 5]

4/10.

Segunda parte de "La pasión según Satán" e igual de flojo.

[Lilou S · Rating 3 out of 5]

Histoire mélangeant magie, alchimie, golems et religion.

On suit deux personnages : Lodaus, un chatelain miroitant autour des connaissances, de la magie, de multiples dimension et d’alchimie. Je trouve sa partie très intéressante, néanmoins j’avoue avoir du mal à comprendre son objectif et son réel caractère (peut être parce que je n’ai pas lu le premier livre?). Sa partie à lui est très axée vers les connaissances des différentes religions existantes (même certaines plus minimes) donc, peut être aussi pour comprendre complètement l’intrigue faut il être calé aussi dans ce domaine (on l’aura comprit je ne le suis pas non plus).

Le deuxieme personnage est Sandra. Et franchement que dire à part 2 choses: on voit clairement que l’histoire a été écrite par un homme de 1 et de deux Sandra pitié ait des standards enfaite. Son personnage est creux et stéréotypé de la femme suivant uniquement les hommes et le sexe, sans réelle force de décision ou d’évolution. Sa partie à elle comporte des scènes très violentes, ayant moins présente dans celles de Lodaus (vi*l, mutilation, esclavagisme, mort, fixation cheulou de l’auteur sur les seins (VRAIMENT MEC WTF)).

Bref, je n’ai pas lue les autres tomes mais je pense que lire un autre que celui ci pourrait être un meilleur choix sachant la partie de Sandra. Néanmoins le lire se lit très bien et nous tiens dans un brouillard mystérieux agréable et il est extrêmement bien écrit et détaillé. J’ai mis trois étoiles car le livre m’a apporté des connaissances que je n’avais pas mais sinon je pense que j’en aurais mis 2.